The articles and essays in this blog range from the short to the long. Many of the posts are also introductory (i.e., educational) in nature; though, even when introductory, they still include additional commentary. Older material (dating back mainly to 2005) is being added to this blog over time.

Monday, 26 January 2015

David Chalmers on Type-A Materialism

“that
there be duplicates of conscious beings that have absent or inverted
conscious states”.

This
can't be a logical argument because surely this could happen. It must
be a scientific or physical argument that states that if P,
then Q.

Type-A
materialists also claim that Mary isn't ignorant of any phenomenal
‘truths’ inside her black and white room. As with ‘facts’,
what does Frank Jackson mean by ‘phenomenal truths’? There are
some things Mary is ignorant of; though are they ‘facts’ or
‘truths’? And what does it mean to say that she “gains an
ability”? Does it mean the ability to, say, discriminate red
from green?

The
materialist can accept that there's such a thing as consciousness;
it’s just that he can define ‘consciousness’ in his own
peculiar technical way.

For
example, analytic functionalists or logical behaviourists define
‘consciousness’ in terms of “wholly functional or behavioural
terms”. More specifically, they talk in terms of “certain sorts
of access to information, and/or certain sorts of dispositions to
make verbal reports”. Of course intuitively these definitions
are far from acceptable and they simply leave out - amongst other
things - the question of what it is like to be conscious –
that is, they leave out entirely the first-person reality of
conscious states.

How
can consciousness only be about behaviour or functional states
because a zombie or a machine could – at least in principle -
replicate our behaviour and functional states. Similarly with
accessing information and ‘overt behaviour’.

Thus
this seems like a simple stipulative definition of ‘consciousness’
on the analytic functionalist or logical behaviourist’s part. And
why not?

More
relevantly, type-A materialists believe that there's nothing further
to be explained about consciousness over and above explaining the
various functions. If this is the case, then Daniel Dennett, for one,
has indeed explained consciousness! Though only by stipulating that
there's nothing, in fact, to be explained!

To
be clear: what precisely are these functions?

They
include the “capacities for access, self-monitoring, report,
control, and their interaction”. Importantly, a being’s
environmental relations and neurobiology will also be of importance
to such materialist accounts of consciousness.

There
are three responses to the above:

Such
functions are irrelevant to an explanation of consciousness.

Functions
are relevant to a story of consciousness; though there's something
above and beyond functionality to also explain.

Functions,
neurobiology and environmental relations will tell us all we need to
know about consciousness.

Is
consciousness like everything else in nature? Type-A materialists
argue that it is and they argue by analogy.

For
example, in explaining life “the only phenomena that present
themselves as needing explanation are adaptation, growth, metabolism,
reproduction, and so on”. We can now say:

The
vitalist, of course, argued that there's more to life than the list
above. What about consciousness? Is there more to the list above?
What if consciousness is somehow unique? What would make it unique?
Phenomenal experience? And is this over and above the list above?

Dennett
seems to argue that if the old-fashioned vitalist was wrong about
life, perhaps non-materialist philosophers are wrong about
consciousness. Is the analogy exact? David Chalmers cites Broad (who
was a vitalist about life). Broad believed that the (biological?)
functions “would require a non-mechanical explanation”.
Broad also had something to say about the analogy with consciousness
and argued that life and consciousness aren't the same. Indeed his
position on life appears to be behaviourist in orientation. He

“held
that in the case of life, unlike the case of consciousness, the only
evidence we have for the phenomenon is behavioural, and that 'being
alive' means exhibiting certain sorts of behaviour”.

This
seems a thoroughly behavioural account, as I've already said. Why did
he also say that “functions would require a non-mechanical
explanation”? This isn't really explained in Chalmers’ paper.

We
can also see an explicit behaviourist account of qualia.

Rey
argues, for instance, “that there is no reason to postulate qualia,
since they are not needed to explain behaviour” (12). The obvious
and immediate riposte to this argument is the question: Why should
we see behaviour as everything that is the case? And even if
qualia aren't needed to explain behaviour (or don't even cause
behaviour), why should this be the end of the story? There's still
something it is like to taste milk or experience an orgasm.

Dennet
offers a similarly behaviourist account of consciousness. It is
verbal reports that are of prime importance to Dennett. And, of
course, overt behaviour is behaviour.

Again,
why stop at verbal reports? Isn’t there something else to add to
this story of consciousness? Even Quine was only a semantic
behaviourist in that examples of overt behaviour were the sole
grounds of meaning and other semantic properties. The semantic can
only be known through what is said and what is written. Though this
isn't psychological behaviourism. Would Quine have rejected the need
for an explanation - or even an acknowledgement - of qualia and other
non-semantic phenomena? Is Wittgenstein’s ‘private language
argument’ also applicable to the phenomena we call ‘qualia’?